A Silver Lining (19 page)

She owed Laura nearly three pounds, and their tab at Hopkins’ corner shop stood at ten shillings. She took a deep breath. Bobby was right. They were getting deeper and deeper into debt and she could take one of two ways out.

On the basis of the figures she’d just worked out, if she opted for the workhouse they might as well walk out of the house and up to Courthouse Street tonight. There was no need even to pack a bag. They wouldn’t be allowed their own things. Her mother would have to wear the grey uniform of the women’s geriatric ward, and she would be set to scrubbing floors in the coarse overalls of the women’s ward until they found her outside domestic work. Either way she probably wouldn’t be allowed to see her mother except on high days and holidays ever again.

And the alternative? It was merely a question of who she preferred: Charlie or Bobby? After all, as Bobby had so crudely put it, it wouldn’t be that big a step to take. She had played the part of the fancy woman already, she thought resentfully, remembering Ronnie Ronconi and the French letters he had bought to use in the cold bedroom above the café, before Maud Powell had come on the scene.

But it had been different with Ronnie. She couldn’t even remember deciding to sleep with him. It had just happened as a natural result of the passion he had engendered within her. She had lived for the moments when she and Ronnie had been alone, naked in one another’s arms ... But now there was no Ronnie, only Bobby Thomas, married, his breath and clothes smelling of drink.

Bobby’s sly insinuations and leering looks unnerved and frightened her. At least Russian Charlie was clean, and the wages he offered meant she and her mother could leave worries about rent and Morgan Street behind them. If he kept his word about the meat, fuel and rent it would also mean that in time she would be able to pay off every penny they owed.

Charlie would probably call into the café sometime over the weekend. She resolved to ask Tony to tell him to wait for her after work. The sooner she took him up on his offer the better. And if he expected her to sleep with him as part of the arrangement, what did it matter? One man couldn’t be that different from another.

William was the first tradesman into the butchers’ market on Friday morning. For three weeks, ever since Charlie had picked up the key to the shop, he seemed to have done nothing but work. Scrub, clean and paint until late at night after his stints in the slaughterhouse. Run the stall single-handed while Charlie negotiated meat at wholesale prices, or checked out the cost of repairing the roof. He’d even put four extra hours in at the slaughterhouse late last night to help Charlie cut all the meat they needed for the weekend so Charlie could take this morning off to meet the builder he’d finally chosen to carry out the repairs.

It had been hard work, but it had been worth it. At least it enabled him to steal an extra ten minutes in bed. He dumped the pig he was carrying, feet down. Propping its back against the side of the closed shutters, he pulled Charlie’s keys out of his overall pocket and heaved on the padlock. He glanced down the aisle of stalls, peering into the dairy market in the hope of catching a glimpse of Vera. He’d spent the last four Saturday nights on the hearth-rug in her kitchen, and was already shivering in anticipation. The hands of the clock over the door pointed to five. Another forty-one hours and he’d be there.

He spent all his waking hours thinking about Vera, and the things they did to one another. She was even beginning to haunt his dreams, naked except for cream silk stockings and a white satin and lace suspender belt, her breasts beautifully, deliciously bare, her arms extended, waiting to accept his embrace, her thighs parted –ready. Last night he’d woken to find Eddie pounding him viciously in the chest, telling him to stop moaning, or else.

‘Will.’

‘Good God, where did you spring from?’ His mouth went dry as he stepped closer to the shutters, shielding her with his body to minimise the risk of anyone seeing them.

‘I came in through the clothes market.’ She smiled coyly, looking up at him from beneath lowered lashes with an expression that sent his pulse rate soaring.

‘George thinks I’m having breakfast with my mother. He had to drive up to the farm because he sold out of clotted cream yesterday. He won’t be here for at least another half-hour. No one will.’

William forgot all the promises he’d made to Charlie about jointing carcasses and preparing the stall. He wanted Vera. Now. This minute. He couldn’t wait until Saturday night. He looked around. Someone was moving down in the second-hand clothes market, but they were too far away to see anything.

‘Quick.’

He unlocked the shutters and pulled her towards him. ‘Crawl in there before anyone sees you.’

Vera needed no second bidding. Dropping to her hands and knees she crept through the gap in the side of the boards. William relocked the shutters and after a second check, ducked beneath the shutters himself.

Pushing the door shut, he wedged it with his foot.

‘You are clever. No one would know we’re here,’ Vera giggled.

Her voice sounded eerie in the darkness. All he could see were one or two cracks of grey light through chinks in the thick wooden shutters. The smell was overpowering: washing soda and stale meat, strongly and improbably perfumed with attar of roses, Vera’s favourite scent, or so she had told him three times before he’d finally taken the hint and gone out and bought her a bottle.

‘Ssh!’ he commanded, suddenly terrified as footsteps echoed towards them. They halted just outside the stall. He could even hear someone breathing. As he crouched there, quivering in the darkness, he cursed the madness that had overtaken him. If George tore the shutters open above their heads now, what could he say?

‘I dropped my keys and Vera was helping me find them?’ Or, ‘We’re playing hide and seek, do you want a game?’

After an eternity, whoever it was moved, walking with sluggish steps towards the dairy market. William breathed again. He opened his mouth ready to tell Vera to go, then felt her fingers working to unfasten the buttons on his overall. Seconds later they were at his fly. She pulled him on top of her. He fell forward, but was careful to keep the soles of his feet firmly against the half-door let into the side of the stall. She’d hitched the skirt of her overall high, and as he slid his hand between her stockinged legs he realised she wasn’t wearing any underclothes. She moaned softly, shifting beneath his weight.

‘No noise,’ he hissed into where he thought her ear should be. ‘For God’s sake, no noise.’

He didn’t enjoy what followed. Fearful of every footfall, every bang of neighbouring shutters opening.

And when it was over and he crawled outside to check the lie of the land he saw that his overall was covered with sawdust.

‘Been rolling around in the hay, Will?’ Eddie laughed as he carried a bucket of water over to Wilf Horton’s stall.

‘Dropped my keys,’ he shouted back. As soon as Eddie’d gone he whispered to Vera. ‘Out now. Quick.’

She tripped over her high-heeled shoes as she emerged.

‘Your overall is filthy,’ he groaned as she struggled to her feet.

‘Thank you for helping me up, Mr Powell,’ she said in a loud voice as Mrs Walker passed them. ‘It was stupid of me to trip. And I think you’re right. I will have to go home to change.’

Ostensibly unlocking the stall, he watched as she tottered away. The seams of her stockings were crooked. There was a ladder in the back of her heel, and her white overall was covered in black smuts and sawdust; but dirty and dishevelled, she still exuded sex as she swung her hips enticingly, allowing the cloth to flow over her thighs.

As he lusted after her retreating figure he reminded himself that he alone among the men in the market knew she was practically naked beneath her overall. He also vowed never to take such a risk again. Saturday nights with George down the road in the Queens Hotel were dangerous enough; Charlie’s stall on a Friday morning was sheer lunacy.

He folded back the shutters and clipped them to the sides of the stall. He opened the meat safe, and taking out the largest knife went to get the pig. He stared in disbelief at the vacant space where he had left it. Panic-stricken, he walked around the stall. It was nowhere to be seen. Feeling sick, he locked himself behind the counter and began to unpack the safe of the meat they’d prepared the night before. A whole pig represented three trading days’ profits. Charlie would kill him. Particularly now when the shop was taking every penny of his spare cash. It would take a month of overtime and working for nothing to pay Charlie back. And he hadn’t even been able to take a good look at Vera.

‘Here you are, Alma, your wages. You wanted them a day early.’

‘For the rent, yes. Thanks Tony.’ She took the three half-crowns and sixpence he handed her and secreted them in her purse.

‘You managing all right?’ he asked, thinking she looked even paler and thinner in the face than usual.

‘I’m managing fine,’ she answered quickly. Too quickly, judging by the fleeting expression of concern that crossed his face. ‘See you usual time tomorrow.’ She put on her coat, checked her tam was straight in the mirror that hung behind the counter and went out.

It was raining heavily again, she noticed miserably as she hesitated to tie a headscarf over her hat. Putting her head down into the wind, looking neither to the left nor right, she began to walk.

It was the tail end of a long, hard week. She had waited impatiently for Charlie to appear in the café. Tony had begun to give her odd looks when she came in every night asking the same question. ‘Has Charlie been in?’

No one had seen him, or, for that matter, William or Eddie Powell around anywhere except the market for two weeks. And tonight had been the last straw. Glan Richards had overheard her asking Tina about Charlie yet again, and shouted through to the kitchen from the café ‘Will I do?’

The cheap gibe had earned him a laugh, and done nothing to increase her self-respect, or standing with the Ronconis. Rightly or wrongly, she was beginning to feel they would be happy to show her the door as Mostyn Goldman had done. Whatever strings were attached to Charlie’s offer of a job and accommodation, she now saw it as the only escape from the deepening pit of debt. But no matter how she tried to explain or dismiss his absence to herself, Charlie’s disappearance from his usual haunts worried her.

She lacked the courage to go looking for him in the market, and couldn’t understand why he had forsaken the café, unless ... unless he had taken her less than enthusiastic response to his offer as a refusal. She could well be building her future on a job Charlie had already given to someone else. And if he had? What would she do then?

It had taken her entire wages and the remnants of her mother’s pension to pay off last week’s rent, less one and six that despite all her efforts she had failed to raise.

Terrified of what Bobby might do, she had tried to cover the difference by pawning the blankets and pillows off her bed, but Arthur Faller had refused to take them, saying they were too worn.

She was dreading tonight, or tomorrow morning at the latest, when she would have to sit her mother down and explain exactly how things stood.

She had to put a stop to the Lane children’s daily trips to the corner shop to pick up her mother’s bread, marge, tea and sugar. Every morning this week she had listened while her mother had given them her order, and every morning she had clenched her fists and grit her teeth dreading their return, waiting for them to say, ‘Sorry Auntie Moore, but Mrs Hopkins says your tab’s full, and we can’t bring you anything else until it’s paid off.’

Food –she wished she could stop thinking about it. It had become an obsession since the beginning of last week when she’d cut down severely on her own meals in the hope of making a saving on their grocery bill. She limited herself to half a piece of bread and margarine at breakfast, half at dinner and half before she went to work in the café.

But she’d waited in vain for the hunger pangs to subside as her stomach shrank. If anything, the pangs had begun to dominate her waking thoughts, not to mention her sleeping ones.

Last night she’d dreamed of cream cakes and chocolates like the ones she drooled over every time she passed the display window of St Catherine’s café in the Arcade. She had even caught herself looking longingly at the scrapings left on the plates that came into the kitchen to be washed. It was just as well that she spent most of her time on vegetable preparation, not dishwashing or cooking, otherwise she might be tempted to put more than the odd lump of raw carrot or raw potato in her mouth when she could be sure Angelo and Tony weren’t looking.

But no matter how she cut back, the bill in the corner shop mounted alarmingly higher with every passing day and the rent loomed too. They formed a double-edged sword of Damocles, poised, ready to fall at any moment and wreck destruction on what little remained of their home.

She had to talk to her mother first thing in the morning. But it would help if her bad news could be softened by some good. If only she’d been able to see Charlie first and be sure of the job –perhaps if she sent one of the Lane children to him with a note? The market opened very early ... .

A cat-call echoed across the empty street. Terror prickled down her spine as she remembered Bobby and his foul propositions. Staring at the pavement and walking in the shadow of the buildings, she hurried forward. It had been twelve o’clock when she had left the café. The pubs had disgorged their last customers over an hour ago. No one but shift workers and the police should be on the streets now, and of course tramps. She wasn’t sure who she was most afraid of meeting, Bobby or a tramp.

She glanced furtively over her shoulder. If it hadn’t been for the whistling cat-call she could have sworn that the street was empty. Perhaps it
was
a tramp? Like the awful hobo she had seen in the American second feature that had played with
The Scarlet Pimpernel.
It had been over six months since she had treated herself to a visit to the cinema, but she could recall every detail, not only of the main film, but also of the short, cartoon, second feature and newsreel. And that tramp had terrified her.